Bursaries and Scholarships
The Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of Canada is dedicated to helping Aboriginals reach the highest standard of excellence in finance and management. AFOA’s initiatives in the development of Awards and Scholarships are examples of that commitment.
See link below for scholarships and bursaries.
http://www.metisnation.org/programs/education–training/education/bursaries–scholarships
It’s never too early or too late to put together a resume that you can pair with a strong cover letter to make sure you land the perfect summer job. Ideally, each resume and cover letter that you give to potential employers should be tailored to the position for which you are applying. There is no need to fret if you don’t have much previous work experience as long as you can demonstrate that you have skills, goals and a desire to learn.
When you lack years of work experience, a skills-based resume that highlight your strengths can come in handy. The skills-based resume includes a list of your education and work/volunteer history, but it focuses in on the key skills that you have that would be most important for the job. In a short list that summarizes some of your skills, include examples from your experiences that show how you have successfully demonstrated those skills.
A lot of the skills might derive from things you use do every day at school. For instance, you demonstrated effective “time-management” and “organizational skills” that your teacher commended you for because you continually handed in assignments on time, even though you attend choir and basketball practices after school most days of the week. Perhaps you have shown strong “multi-tasking skills” when you babysat twins while finishing all of your math homework. That also demonstrates that you are “responsible”. If you planned a large birthday party for your sibling and invited everyone online, you may have demonstrated your aptitude for “event planning” and “computer skills”. If you play on a team or are a member of a club, you can tell your potential employer that you are a “team leader “and “personable”. If you started a club or program or ran for a spot on the student council, you can say you are a “goal-oriented” individual who “demonstrates initiative “and has a “strong work ethic”. There are loads of examples to use, just be sure you choose the ones that relate most closely to what you think you’ll be doing at work when you get the job.
Use the resume and cover letter to show the employer that the job you want fits in with your goals. Make sure he or she knows that you are eager to learn what it takes to excel. Learn about the company you’re applying for and refer to that knowledge in your letter. Finally, when you go in for an interview be confident that you’re the right person for the job!
Good luck and happy job hunting!
Taking a year off from school before university or college might be one of the best decisions you’ll ever make. It could be a year filled with self-discovery and joy. All you have to do is seize the day — or “carpe diem” as they say in Latin. The following are a few ideas to help you make the most of your gap year.
Learn a Hobby
It’s never too late to learn a new skill, such as learning how to play the piano, mastering a new language, or trying out photography. Well, now’s the time to do it! During your gap year, when you have a break from school, you’ll probably have a lot more time on your hands — and you might not know what to do with it. As you try a new hobby and add more variety into your life, you might find a life-long passion that will bring you joy for years to come.
Furthermore, we all need balance in our lives: a balance between work and leisure. During your final year of high school, you were probably busy studying, working, and preparing for university or college. Now it’s time to strike a balance and have more fun.
Volunteer
You may be only one person, and a young person at that, but you can make a positive difference in your community (as cliché as it sounds). There are so many not-for-profit organizations that would be happy to have your help. For example, if you love animals you could volunteer at a local animal shelter walking dogs. Although you won’t get paid, you will benefit great deal from the experience – helping others could give your life a deeper sense of meaning and fulfillment.
If you’re thinking about pursuing a career, such as journalism, but you’re not sure if it’s the right career choice for you, try volunteering at your local newspaper. This will help you get your “feet wet” and decide if it’s your dream occupation, and you’ll receive further clarification about which university or college program you should apply for.
Be an Intern
Besides volunteering, taking an internship during your gap year is a great way to try out an occupation that you’re interested in. It’s also a fantastic way to experience the professional world, where you’ll learn all about office culture, proper etiquette, how to dress, etc. The experience could really help you mature into the professional young man or woman you’d like to be.
Additionally, taking on an internship will help you network and gain professional contacts. If you’re lucky, someone will decide to take you under their wing and mentor you. Then you’ll have the perfect role model to follow — someone who could help lead you to your dream career.
Spend Time with Your Family
Enjoying your family’s company might not be on the top of your priority list. Yet, a few years from now when you’re off at university or college and living on your own, you might reminisce about the past and wish you had spent more quality time with your loved ones. So, savour and appreciate your family — go on short trips, play board games, watch movies together, etc. You’ll be glad you did!
The following are five careers that you probably did not know existed – or, at the very least, you didn’t realize they were real options for you.. When choosing a career, the first thing that people usually do is to start with “conventional” ideas – doctor, lawyer, that sort of thing. But the objective isn’t to choose the most popular career; instead, you’re looking for something that you would enjoy doing. It’s your life, and sometimes it pays to think outside the box.
1. Underwater Construction Worker / Salvager
Have you ever wondered how companies fix their structures once they’ve been put underwater? Here’s your answer. These professionals work on projects building and repairing structures like bridges, docks, pipelines, cables – the list is endless. The training involves completing a program, like Seneca College’s 34-week “Underwater Skills” at King Campus – and, of course, becoming a certified diver. If this sounds like something that might interest you, take a look at http://www.senecac.on.ca/uws and www.mcmarine.ca.
2. Public Health Inspector
Have you ever considered what a Public Health Inspector actually does? Health and public safety professionals solve problems, communicate with people, and keep the public safe from food-borne illnesses. Their tasks may involve conducting on-site inspections of food processing plants (or even day care centres, schools, etc.), responding to written complaints on behalf of a company, or conducting workshops educating people about proper food handling. For more information, take a look at http://www.uoguelph.ca/oac/academics/food.
3. Aviation Technician
“Aviation technician” is a title given to someone who performs aircraft repair and maintenance. Technicians learn to inspect aircraft, diagnose problems, repair the components of an aircraft, and perform tests to ensure that planes operate according to industry standards. If you have always loved both planes and mechanics, you might look into one of the following programs: http://goo.gl/HmVko. You can read more about this career option this month on our Trades page!
4. Video Game Artist
As the video game industry expands, so does the amount of digital artwork to be done. Video game artists design and create the visual elements in games, from environments to moveable objects to characters. Aspiring artists learn skills like 3D modeling, life drawing, texturing, and game engine production. Programs are offered at Seneca College http://www.senecac.on.ca/fulltime/GAA.html as well as Centennial College http://goo.gl/GMeQB.
5. Chef
If you enjoy cooking and think you might like to become a professional chef, you can take courses which will take you from baker to culinary creator. Every restaurant, every hotel, every catering company and spa has a chef; if this is your passion, there is certainly great potential for employment. Take a look at George Brown’s 1-year program in Culinary Skills: http://www.georgebrown.ca/H112-2012-2013.
What is a Cartographer?
When was the last time you looked at a map? Though you may not realize it, it probably wasn’t that long ago. Cartographers (or map makers) are usually associated with the paper incarnation of the navigation tool – the professional has learned to adapt to rapidly developing technologies. If you’ve looked up directions online, chances are a cartographer is responsible for building and updating the digital map you used.
Traditionally, a cartographer would draw the lay of the land on paper. Depending on the nature of the map and what its intended use was, maps would typically depict important markers like major landmarks and cities. Aerial photography, computer programming and worldwide networks have forever changed how members of this profession complete their work. For instance, have you ever seen the Google Maps car or used the ‘street view’ function? Using onsite photographs, cartographers are able to reconstruct locations around the world. Another crucial tool is satellite imagery; Aerial pictures taken by satellites allow cartographers to keep maps up-to-date, preserving accuracy.
Education and Skills
There are a variety of ways to become a cartographer, but a having an interest in geography, math and science is key. Cartographers usually have a bachelor’s degree in cartography, geography, surveying, engineering, forestry, computer science, or earth sciences. With the advent of digital information sources, a strong aptitude for computer programming is highly desirable.
Cartographers must be technically-minded and able to easily solve discrepancies in logic. Creating and maintaining geological and statistical data can be tedious work, making patience and endurance invaluable skills.
Salary
Most cartographers earn between $50,000-$60,000 annually.
Day-To-Day
Cartographers tend to spend the bulk of their time in offices working on computers. Much of their time is spent collecting, analyzing, interpreting and publishing data. Most of their work involves interpreting multiple factors, including but not limited to: landscape, law, climate conditions and changes in population and cultures. Mechanical drawing and map composition remains a fundamental part of the job, but these tasks are usually completed in a digital capacity.
Hi! This is Jami and Ben – both fourth year students who attend Brock University. We decided to sit down and collaborate on a list of things we wish we had known before coming to university in the hopes that we can help future university students avoid the frustration and disappointment associated with finding out crucial information a little too late.
1. Attend campus tours – This helps you to get familiar with the general location of important buildings and departments. It also helps you to know where your classes are so that your first day is not so overwhelming.
2. Become best friends with your course/program calendar and academic adviser – Program guides are usually available online or as print copies at your university. These documents are useful in ensuring that you meet your degree requirements, but also typically give a list of courses along with their respective descriptions – use this to make sure your courses/program interest you! Your academic adviser can help make sure you are on track towards completing your degree, can provide assistance if you aren’t sure your program is right for you, or can offer you guidance concerning which courses to take – and more!
3. Visit your Career Centre – We cannot stress how lifesaving a place this can be. From general job search help (including resume and cover letter assistance) to grad school information and career planning, your school’s career centre can help you when making difficult career-related decisions.
4. Get involved – This can be done in a variety of ways and we suggest doing as many as you can! First, attending your orientation day/week events can help you get comfortable with your new environment and can answer many of the questions you have. Second, join a club or co-curricular activity, such as a mentoring program or students’ association in order to meet new people, provide you with networking opportunities, and make you feel more integrated into your university community. Third, volunteer or intern in your spare time – this looks great on a resume and can make you feel great about helping others! Fourth, attend career fairs and events in order to find exciting opportunities for part-time, full-time, career, abroad opportunities and more!
While this list is not exhaustive, these are things that we did not think to do until later in our university careers, so we feel like we missed out on some great experiences and are now trying to catch up! Take our advice – ask questions, get involved, get informed. It will make your transition from high school to university much smoother and will aid in making your transition from university to the “real world” a lot easier, too! Good luck!
Scientists often come up with new discoveries, technologies or theories. But sometimes they rediscover what our ancestors already knew. A couple of recent findings show we have a lot to learn from our forebears — and nature — about bugs.
Modern methods of controlling pests have consisted mainly of poisoning them with chemicals. But that’s led to problems. Pesticides kill far more than the bugs they target, and pollute air, water and soil. As we learned with the widespread use of DDT to control agricultural pests and mosquitoes, chemicals can bioaccumulate, meaning molecules may concentrate hundreds of thousands of times up the food web — eventually reaching people.
As Rachel Carson wrote in her 1962 book Silent Spring, using DDT widely without knowing the full consequences was folly. She showed it was polluting water and killing wildlife, especially birds, and that it could cause cancer in humans. Her book launched the environmental movement but did little to change our overall strategy for dealing with bugs. Although DDT was banned worldwide for agricultural purposes in 2001, the chemical is still used to control insects that spread disease.
Recent research shows that widespread use of pesticides like DDT may have caused us to ignore or forget benign methods of pest control. Because the chemicals were so effective, infestations were reduced and there was little interest in non-toxic methods. But bugs evolve quickly and can become immune to pesticides. That’s true of bedbugs, the now ubiquitous critters that are showing up around the world in homes, hotels, schools, movie theatres — even libraries.
But a method used long ago provides an effective and non-toxic weapon against the pests, according to a U.S. study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The authors looked into the once-common Eastern European practice of spreading bean leaves around a bed to control bedbugs;. What they found was fascinating.
“During the night, bed bugs walking on the floor would accumulate on these bean leaves, which were collected and burned the following morning to exterminate the bed bugs. The entrapment of bed bugs by the bean leaves was attributed to the action of microscopic plant hairs (trichomes) on the leaf surfaces that would entangle the legs of the bed bugs,” the scientists, from the University of California, Irvine, and University of Kentucky, wrote.
They discovered that after bugs get caught up in the hooked plant hairs, they struggle to escape, and in the process vulnerable parts of their feet are pierced by the hooks, permanently trapping them. The research focuses on a way to replicate this. “This physical entrapment is a source of inspiration in the development of new and sustainable methods to control the burgeoning numbers of bed bugs,” the researchers wrote, adding that the method “would avoid the problem of pesticide resistance that has been documented extensively for this insect.”
Other research has literally dug up pest control methods that go back millennia. An international team of archeologists recently found evidence that people living in South Africa almost 80,000 years ago made bedding out of insect-repelling plants.
According to the journal Science, the research team found 15 different layers containing bedding made from compacted stems and leaves of sedges and rushes, dating between 77,000 and 38,000 years ago. One layer of leaves was identified as River Wild-quince, which contains “chemicals that are insecticidal, and would be suitable for repelling mosquitoes.” The archeologists also found evidence that people often burned the bedding after use, possibly to remove pests.
These are just two examples of what we can learn from our ancestors and from nature. Because natural systems tend toward balance, the fascinating field of biomimicry has developed to explore what nature can teach us. It’s aimed at finding “sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies,” according to the Biomimicry Guild website. “The goal is to create products, processes, and policies — new ways of living — that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.”
Maybe the truest sign of human intelligence is not to learn how we can shoehorn nature into our own agenda, but to see how we can better find our own place in nature.
Competition.
You are going to deal with it at every stage of life. Whether you are applying for a retail job at the Gap, signing up to be a summer camp counsellor, applying for a job at your neighborhood Taco Bell or even applying to university or college, you will face competition.
Competition is a good thing, depending on how you look at it. Competition allows an employer to pick the very best person out of all the people applying for a given job. Competition allows an admissions committee to choose the brightest student out of the pool of applicants applying for a particular university or college program.
On the flip side, competition means that the more people applying for a given spot, the tougher it will be for any one person to get that spot. Often times, there is only one or a limited number of spots available which everyone seems to be fighting for. (This is the part most people don’t like about competition!)
Interestingly, there are some people who thrive on competition. To these people, the thought of competing among other individuals for the same spot drives them to be the best of the best. It pushes them to excel farther beyond their potential. It pushes them to improve so they stand out from the rest.
Other people, however, find competition daunting and even debilitating. The thought of so many individuals vying for one or a few spots scares them so much that they may not even bother to compete. They may also feel that the competition is far better or has much more to offer than they do, so they worry that they aren’t good enough and bring themselves down. If you fall into this group, rest assured you aren’t alone. There are a lot of people who find competition nerve-wracking. Since you can’t avoid competition (it’s part of life, after all), here are three tips that can help you handle it better:
1. Forget about the competition — This may sound crazy to you at first, but hear me out. Focusing on who your competition is can sometimes negatively affect you and bring you down. Don’t think about all the people applying for a job at the Gap, for example. Instead, focus on you and what you have to offer to the Gap store manager.
2. Do the best you can — The key word in this statement is “you”. Everyone’s best will differ. Don’t focus on trying to be better than someone else – it can be stressful and hard to match. Instead, focus on being the best you can be. For example, do whatever you can do to be the best applicant for the camp counsellor position this summer or to be the best candidate for the college/university program you are applying for.
3. Keep pushing forward — If you got the job or university/college spot you were applying for, then great! If you didn’t, that’s okay too. Unfortunately, you can’t win them all in life. Every successful person knows this. Every successful person also knows that it doesn’t mean you stop trying – you have to keep pushing forward. Apply for a job at another retail store or fast food outlet, apply to another school or apply next year to the same program. Always pick yourself up and keep pushing forward!
The internet is a great source of information. You could research, connect with friends and relatives, shop for various things and you could even finish or earn an online college degree. With the advent of technology, everything seems to be just a click away. But the World Wide Web is not just a source of facts, it is also full of scams.
More students are becoming interested in acquiring online college degrees. In fact, as of 2007, there are already 3.7 million online students. It is easier for working parents, single parents and the disabled to take online college degrees since geographical location is not a big issue. Time and budget would depend on the student.
But online college programs are not the only ones increasing in popularity – bogus online colleges are also proliferating on the internet. The issue of having fake college degrees and diplomas is not new; the internet just gave the problem a new look. Nowadays they are called diploma or degree mills.
Fake online colleges would provide an illusion that they are a reputable and solid online academic institution. But when researchers and experts check their domain name, it would show that they do not have a concrete campus or office.
How could you differentiate illegal and legitimate online colleges and universities? There are two ways these fake institutions would market. They could blatantly announce that they are selling bogus college diplomas, while there are others which would pretend to have a solid academic background and fool the people. How do you protect yourself from such scams?
• Ask questions. It has been a common notion to never question a college or a university. But when dealing with online colleges, it is important to ask questions about management, offered courses, etc. to get an idea about its credibility.
• Check the accreditation of the online college in question. Even if they are saying that they are accredited do not settle until you have completely verified their accreditation.
• They do not require anything else other than credit card information. Online colleges require high school transcripts, previous academic records and test scores. It is likely you are dealing with fake institutions if the only thing important for them is money.
• Earning your degree would only take you about 30 days after enrollment. A real college degree, even if it is online, is something that you would have to earn and not something that would be handed to you regardless of your status.
• The online college in question has multiple complaints filed against them. You could check your local provincial government or the Better Business Bureau to see if they have lists of unaccredited colleges.
Better opportunities
You may decide to move far away to attend a college or university that will give you more opportunities. Even if you currently live near a post-secondary institution, that school might not have the resources you require. These could include a prestigious faculty, excellent scholarships to help you fund your studies, and renowned academics to give you the best start in your career. Here’s some great advice: choose a school that best suits you. Don’t let the location of the school and how far it is from your home deter you from pursuing your dreams.
Grow up
A university or college, with its residence or “dorm-style” living, can be the perfect environment for you to develop into a young adult. Such living arrangements give you sufficient support while also providing you with the space you need to spread your wings and “grow up” at the same time — but not too fast. Under the shelter of the university or college bubble you can make smoother transition into adulthood.
Indeed, moving far away from home will give you plenty of independence. No one will be there to wake you up in the morning, drive you to school, or check up on you when you come home late at night. Away from your family, perhaps for the first time, this freedom can be intoxicating. Yet, even though you will have more responsibilities than ever before, when you live in a dorm you won’t have to worry about paying a hydro bill and most of your food will be provided for you on campus.
These responsibilities will prepare you for the following year, when you probably wont be living in a dorm anymore but will instead be living with your friends in an apartment or house for the first time. Living far away from the shelter of your family home, you can grow up much faster than you ever expected.
Become a World Citizen
Step outside your comfort zone. Why not move to a metropolitan area that has a much more diverse, multicultural population than your hometown? Such a prospect might terrify some who are afraid to leave the “nest” and venture out into the world. But for those who are up for the challenge, moving away from home can be an excellent opportunity to expand your worldview. You can meet new people from diverse cultural backgrounds and make friends with a wide range of people — especially if you choose a university or college that’s really far away from home (in another province or even another country). Either way, new experiences and adventures will abound: the world is your playground.
Personal growth
Have you ever heard the saying “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” Well, sometimes spending time away from your roots and your regular routine can help you see your life from a different perspective. Such fresh insight might help you appreciate your life and relationships in ways you never imagined possible. Your sense of gratitude for all the wonderful things and people in your life can actually strengthen your bond with your family and friends. Ironically, moving away can help you move closer to your loved ones.